80 Books Every Person Should Read

We invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create an updated list of books everyone should read. Each participant made 10 picks. It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.

What can we say? We messed up. Our list of "80 Books Every Man Should Read," published several years ago, was rightfully called out for its lack of diversity in both authors and titles. So we invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create a new list. Each participant made 10 picks. It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.

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Michiko Kakutani, @michikokakutani

Michiko Kakutani, @michikokakutani

Chief book critic for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner, and perhaps the only person on earth with the guts to call the work of Philip Roth "flimsy" and that of John Updike "cringe-making."

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The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The author's darkly luminous masterpiece: the original novel about the American Dream—and the most beautifully written, ever.

Selected Stories Of Alice Munro

Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

A buddy movie starring the British surveyors who mapped the boundary between North and South in pre-Revolutionary America and a dazzling post-modernist confection that emerges as the author's most affecting novel yet.